NEW CABINET SWORN IN
Pervez Musharraf swore in the 24-member federal cabinet today. No real surprises. Shah Mehmood Qureshi and Ahmed Mukhtar of the People’s Party (PPP) are, respectively, foreign minister and defense minister. Their public positions have largely called for a continuity in the government’s war on terror and relations with the [...]

Attorney General Malik Qayyum, a senior legal adviser to Pervez Musharraf, has resigned. His departure follows that of many Musharraf allies in recent weeks. The leaves of the Pakistani president have not only withered, they are falling off.
Musharraf is no longer in control of the intelligence services. The heads of the [...]

The PPP and PML-N have yet to finalize all the cabinet posts, though should be done by the weekend. Sherry Rehman will be information minister, which was expected. The PPP will likely get both foreign affairs and defense. BBC Urdu reported yesterday that the PPP’s Shah Mehmood Qureshi will probably be minister [...]

Republican presidential candidate John McCain gave an important foreign policy address to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council today.
McCain described himself as a “realistic idealist.”
He, as he has done for quite some time, emphasized “the threat of radical Islamic terrorism” as the “transcendent challenge of our time.” The Arizona senator said these individuals seek [...]

SORRY, I KNOW WE CAME A BIT EARLY
The big story in Pakistan today was not the swearing in of the new prime minister, but the arrival of Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Boucher. Their two day visit to Pakistan, coming in the midst of a political transition [...]

New Prime Minister: Yousaf Raza Gillani Pakistan was elected as Pakistan’s next prime minister by a wide margin in the National Assembly.  He will be sworn in tomorrow.  Gillani announced that his government will ask for a United Nations investigation into the late Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, order the release of the deposed judges, and implement [...]

Judicial activists have broken the cordon around the home of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, who has been under house arrest for over five months. Chaudhry was expected to be released Tuesday night.
Senior leaders of the lawyers’ movement, including Aitzaz Ahsan, stood along with Chaudhry and members of his family on the balcony of his [...]

People’s Party Spokesman Farhatullah Babar just announced Yousuf Raza Gillani as the incoming governing coalition’s nominee for the prime minister.
Bilawal Bhutto Zardari was to read out the nomination, but PPP spokespeople said he had a cold. A more likely reason is that the young fellow would’ve been unable to handle tough questions surrounding the [...]

Al Jazeera (Arabic) is broadcasting a new audio tape from al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. This is his second audio message in as many days. Bin Laden has not mentioned, as far as I’ve heard so far on the recording, Pakistan or Afghanistan. His focus is Palestine. His major point: jihad [...]

Today, on the election of Pakistan’s first female National Assembly speaker, came reports that a woman was raped in the Karachi mausoleum of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder. The brutal irony, on many levels, is quite obvious.
Karachi, the beloved city of Jinnah the jurist, has suffered from years of endemic crime and lawlessness. [...]